In a modern business environment, proper management of checklists and relevant due dates is essential to success. It is a common practice for individuals to type a list of tasks for a project and delegate that list to others. The list is emailed to others and the individual who delegated the work must remember to follow up and get current progress updates until closure is reached on all tasks. They may need to confirm the work was done properly, review related documents and email conversations. Reviewing 50, 100, etc. separate emails to keep everything straight and hitting deadlines without things falling through the cracks is a difficult and laborious task. Critical dates and important commitments inevitably fall through the cracks when common e-mail and physical follow up are the only methods of delegation and closure.
It would be beneficial to provide a reminder system that seamlessly interfaces with a user's existing email or messaging system, and in some embodiments document management system, calendar (tickler) system and other software, to provide a simple and effective means of generating reminders, prompting users, tracking responses to the reminders (if any), and furnishing meaningful information about task due dates, events, documents, etc., all within a matter of seconds through common email.
When users are responsible for an action item for a checklist, for example establishing a phone number for a new employee hire, they will often put that task in the user's personal calendar system, either an electronic or paper calendar. When the users are looking at their calendars, they are able to determine what their workload for an upcoming time period is and what action items need to be taken; however, usually, no other person in the group or even a supervisor has the ability to look at that person's calendar to determine what the upcoming action items are. Even if a supervisor can look at a person's individual calendar the supervisor will also see (and have to filter out) that person's personal events, such as social engagements, birthdays, and medical appointments. Additionally, in order to have an understanding for what an entire group is responsible for (particularly when a checklist involving multiple tasks handled by a number of different persons, such as in the case of a checklist to prepare for a new employee hire), a supervisor would have to integrate many personal calendars. Even if this could be done, which could be problematic, especially for those who insist upon using paper calendars, the integrated or merged calendar would be littered with personal information, and wading through this irrelevant information can be both time consuming and overwhelming to the supervisor. It would therefore be beneficial to provide a reminder system that allows a supervisor to access a calendar which outlines all action items for each project or task list, or for each individual in the group and/or the group as a whole, without extraneous personal items. It would also be beneficial to provide a reminder system where a supervisor accesses one master calendar that has all action items for a particular group of individuals or a particular project or task checklist and that can be easily sorted by various fields such as dates, clients, matters, responsible party, department, task description and so on.
Another problem of relying, as most businesses do today, on personal calendars is that when the person leaves the organization, the reminders, in many instances, leave too. Even if calendar dates are somehow preserved, the cryptic personal notes the departed employee left behind in his/her calendar may be impossible to interpret. As a consequence, the calendared event may pass without a response or the necessary action being taken. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide a reminder system where the responsibility for action items can be centrally reviewed and be easily transferred from one user to another.